Structured light with a million light planes per second
This work addresses a key bottleneck in high-speed 3D scanning for applications like robotics and motion capture, representing a significant incremental improvement over prior event camera-based systems.
The paper tackles the problem of slow 3D scanning speeds in structured light systems by introducing a system that achieves full-frame 3D scanning at 1000 fps, four times faster than previous fastest systems, using a custom acousto-optic device to project two million light planes per second and adaptive scanning strategies.
We introduce a structured light system that enables full-frame 3D scanning at speeds of $1000\text{ fps}$, four times faster than the previous fastest systems. Our key innovation is the use of a custom acousto-optic light scanning device capable of projecting two million light planes per second. Coupling this device with an event camera allows our system to overcome the key bottleneck preventing previous structured light systems based on event cameras from achieving higher scanning speeds -- the limited rate of illumination steering. Unlike these previous systems, ours uses the event camera's full-frame bandwidth, shifting the speed bottleneck from the illumination side to the imaging side. To mitigate this new bottleneck and further increase scanning speed, we introduce adaptive scanning strategies that leverage the event camera's asynchronous operation by selectively illuminating regions of interest, thereby achieving effective scanning speeds an order of magnitude beyond the camera's theoretical limit.